When The Devil Stays

Chapter Nine: The Thing He Hadn't Said

Jojo was on the phone before Anna had fully processed the message.

He had moved to the window - away from her, facing the courtyard - and his voice was low and rapid and entirely in French, which she spoke well enough to follow the shape of but not the detail, and what she caught was enough: arrival time, terminal, the name of a hotel near the lake that he repeated twice, and then a question she did catch in full because he asked it in English, which told her it was the question that mattered most.

"Is she protected if I'm not with her?"

A pause. He listened. His shoulders, which she had learned to read like weather, shifted in a way that meant the answer was not entirely satisfactory but would have to do.

"Fine," he said. "Two hours."

He hung up and turned around.

Anna was standing in the middle of the room with her arms folded - not defensively, she told herself, just thinking - and she looked at him and waited.

"Sutton landed forty minutes ago," he said. "Private terminal. He's at the Beau-Rivage - it's a hotel on the lake, old money, the kind of place where conversations can happen quietly and without witnesses."

"He's not hiding," she said.

"He doesn't think he needs to," Jojo said. "He's a sitting MP with diplomatic adjacency and a legal team that has made problems disappear before. He's come to negotiate."

"Negotiate," she repeated. "With whom?"

"With me," Jojo said.

The room rearranged itself slightly.

"He knows who you are," she said. Not a question.

"He's known about my firm for eight months," Jojo said. "He's been watching us watch him. That's partly how he's stayed ahead - he knew what we had before we could use it." He paused. "He reached out through a contact an hour ago. He wants a meeting. Tonight."

"And you're going to go," she said.

"Yes."

"Jojo-"

"He won't move against me directly," he said. "A man like Sutton doesn't get his hands dirty when there are lawyers to do it. The meeting is leverage - he wants to know what we have, offer something in exchange for making it go away. He thinks it's still possible to contain this." He looked at her steadily. "It isn't. But I need to know what he's willing to do. What cards he plays tells us what he's most afraid of losing."

Anna looked at him for a long moment. She was doing the calculation - she always did the calculation - and the calculation said: this was sound. Strategically, this was exactly right. You let the other side show their hand. You learned the shape of their fear. It was what she did with numbers and he did with people and the principle was identical.

The calculation also said: he was going to walk into a hotel room with a man who had made other people disappear and she would be here, in this flat, waiting.

"I don't like this," she said.

"I know."

"I want to be clear that I understand the strategy and I still don't like it."

"Noted," he said. "And recorded."

"Who stays with me?"

"Claudine is sending someone - a colleague, ex-Interpol, she vouches for him completely. He'll be outside. You won't need him but he'll be there."

"And you'll be wired," she said. "You'll have someone listening."

A beat. Brief but present.

"Jojo."

"The meeting is at the Beau-Rivage bar," he said. "Public. Forty tables. It's the safest possible venue for this kind of conversation."

"That is not an answer to what I asked."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

"Why won't you have someone listening?"

He was quiet for a moment. Then he crossed the room - not all the way to her, he stopped at the edge of the coffee table, close enough that she had to look up slightly to hold his gaze - and he said, in the voice he used when he was giving her the unpolished version of the truth:

"Because if Sutton finds a wire he walks out and we lose him. And because what I want to know from him tonight is not the kind of thing a man like that says if he thinks anyone else is listening. I need him to believe it's a conversation between two people who understand each other." He paused. "I've done this before. I know how to walk out of a room like that."

"Your father didn't," she said quietly.

It landed. She saw it land - not badly, not as a wound, but as a weight he acknowledged. He looked at her and something moved in his expression that was not the walls going up but the walls being briefly set aside, deliberately, because she had earned it.

"No," he said. "He didn't. He was an honest man in a situation designed to swallow honest men." A pause. "I am not, by profession, an honest man. I am a thorough one. There's a difference."

"And which are you with me?" she asked. The question surprised her as much as him - she hadn't planned it, it arrived fully formed from somewhere she hadn't been looking. "With me, specifically. Which are you?"

He looked at her for a long moment.

"Both," he said. "I'm trying to be both."

The room was very quiet. The afternoon had gone golden and low outside the window and it caught the side of his face and she thought, with a clarity that was almost inconvenient given the circumstances: I am going to fall in love with this man and there is absolutely nothing sensible I can do about it.

She had known it was coming. She had been watching it approach since a coffee shop at Heathrow with the same combination of clear-eyed assessment and absolute helplessness with which you watched a weather front move in from the sea - visible, inevitable, and impossible to redirect.

She didn't say any of this.

"Go," she said instead. "Be careful. Come back."

"In that order," he said.

"In that order."

He picked up his jacket from the chair by the door. Shrugged it on with that particular economy of movement that was entirely him - nothing wasted, nothing performed. He paused at the door with his hand on the frame and looked back at her, and she was struck again by the quality of his attention - the way he looked at her like she was a sentence worth reading slowly.

"Two hours," he said. "If I'm not back or I haven't called in two hours, you call Claudine. You go with her colleague. You don't wait for me."

"I'm not going to agree to that."

"Anna-"

"I'll call Claudine," she said. "I will absolutely call Claudine. I am not making any promises about the part that comes after."

He looked at her. Something in his expression shifted - not frustration, not quite - and then settled into something that looked, if she was reading it correctly, like a man trying very hard not to find something endearing that he was finding very endearing.

"Two hours," he said again, and left.

She stood in the middle of the flat and listened to his footsteps on the stairs and the street door closing below and then silence, and she thought: this is what it is, then. This is the shape of it. Waiting in a white room while he walks into danger and trying not to think about all the reasons this is a terrible idea, and failing completely.

She sat down. Picked up her mug. It was cold. She drank it anyway.

The Beau-Rivage bar was everything Jojo had said - old, quiet, the kind of place that absorbed conversations like good wood absorbed warmth. He arrived first and took a table near the window with his back to the wall and a sightline to both exits and ordered a single malt he didn't intend to drink and waited.